Biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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Biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel!

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. He was the son of a pro­vincial official. He was a complex thinker who dominated the German philosophy in the nineteenth century and influenced western thought for generations. He studied theol­ogy. He worked as a private tutor for a number of years before obtaining his first lowly university post at the age of 33 years. It was not until 5 years later that he published his first major work.

The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which outlined the evolution of human consciousness. It became the foundation of his whole vast system of thought, which he set out principally in the three volumes of his G. W. F. Hegel Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817): the Logic, The Philosophy of Nature and The Philosophy of Mind. Other works—such as G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (1812) and G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821)—elaborated particular sections in more detail.

Further elaborations concerned with the philosophy of history, of aesthetics and of religion appeared after his death and were based on his lecture notes. Hegel was the Professor of Philosophy at Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831 during the great cholera epidemic that swept Europe at that time.

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Hegel was a major influence upon European thought generally and had much to say about politics—set out in detail in his Philosophy of Right. However, he tends not to be as widely studied as perhaps he should be, especially in the English-speaking world. A major reason is Hegel’s bewildering and notorious obscurity.

He is the most difficult of all major thinkers to read. Usually, people who write this obscurely have little to say, or if they do it does not fit together. But Hegel is a rare exception. His philosophy is vast, original and quite breathtakingly audacious.